How To Write an Earworm and Song Loops Essay
In 3 or 12 easy steps
How (ideally) to write an earworm newsletter:
Scratch out a rough draft on Monday or Tuesday
Rewrite, add photos and YouTube videos on Wednesday evening from 7-9pm for a scheduled early morning Thursday delivery.
Get eight hours sleep. Upon waking refreshed, read finished, grammatically flawless newsletter at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.
How the writing actually is written:
Realize it’s Tuesday and you haven’t written a word, there are too many earworms to choose from, the dog needs walking, and it’s your turn to cook dinner tonight. Decide you’ll have plenty of time to write tomorrow.
Wednesday: sketch a rough draft on your phone in between dog walks. Know that it sucks but you can revise later tonight. At night, work on tying personal story to earworm song in a way that feels natural and seamless. Realize this marriage requires time, attention and belief — all of which are in limited supply.
Somehow get a “good enough” draft done at 2:05 am.
Wake up at 3am panicked and anxious. Grab your laptop and do another round of edits. Find a half dozen misspelled words. Notice that you used 10 “actually”’s, 6 “really”’s and 3 “kind of”’s. Delete all but two of them.
Whisper the finished product aloud in bed while trying not to wake up your partner or the dog.
Set the auto-publish for 6:59am, cause that’s when you read is the best time to to send newsletter emails.
3:45am. Try to fall back asleep while caught in a loopy state of exhaustion, accomplishment and self-doubt.
Wake up at 6:45am in a crazed panic, convinced you set the emails to go out at 6:59pm instead of am because that’s the default in Substack.
Fix two more typos you found, then quickly switch out the main photo image. Breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that your grammar police friends won’t unsubscribe from the email list. This time.
Lay wide but bleary-eyed in bed willing the coffee maker to start itself while waiting for the newsletter to go “live,” feeling an odd combination of pride, dread and impatience.
At 6:59am and twenty seconds, read the live newsletter again for the 20th time, in bed, too amped up for coffee.
Drink coffee anyway.
Now you have a peek behind the creative process of this here newsletter! Is that pretty much what you expected? What is your personal creative process? And as this is doubling for the Community of Worms post for the week, feel free to add your week’s earworms in the comments below! I always love to hear from you all!
Oh, and before I forget….
A big thank you for everyone who participated in the polls I put out in late October. I got some great feedback! I’m adding another poll below, as Substack has added a chat feature in their iOS app. I think they are trying to take advantage of the Twitter craziness by adding more live, interactive features.
Is this something you would participate in if I added it to this Substack? Just curious.
Have a great week, y’all!
P.S. — the upgrade to being a paid-subscriber option is available! Join now before inflation forces me to raise the rates!
So much of this sounds familiar Steve!
My worst habit is the over-checking of a post before its scheduled time. Like going back to recheck a door I really know I've locked, somehow I can't help rereading things one more time (just in case the system has suddenly decided to change everything!!).
Tim